While educational pundits who seldom visit actual classrooms, using cherry-picked evidence, would offer an answer, no honest observer or evaluator of American schools can answer the question in 2025.

Changing how teachers teach has been the target of many reformers in the past century. Every generation of reformers, regardless of political ideology, have aimed their bows and arrows at the classroom because they wanted teachers to get students to remember important facts, think rigorously, and heighten creativity. Oops! Also to raise test scores.

What policy-driven reformers discovered then and now, however, is that for any of these initiatives to alter students’ behavior, attitudes and achievement, teachers had to first change their classroom practices either incrementally or totally. If teachers’ lessons hardly moved the needle of change, reformers might as well forget influencing “what” or “how'” students learned.

So, consider the highly-touted introduction of Common Core standards over a decade ago. Have those standards changed how teachers teach their lessons?

Since 2010, nearly all states have adopted the Common Core standards or a modified version of them. Surely, those state policymakers and federal officials who championed these standards believed that adopting these reform-driven standards would lead eventually to improved academic performance for all students (see here).

In the back-and-forth over the politics of these standards, it was easy for these policymakers to lose the critical, no, essential, connection between adopting a policy and implementing it. Any adopted policy aimed at students has to be put into practice by classroom teachers. Not policymakers. Not principals.

The Common Core standards asked teachers to make major shifts in how they teach. So civic and business leaders and academic experts who pushed such reforms forgot a simple fact:  teachers are the gatekeepers to the “what” and “how” of learning. 

Mandating changes in how teachers teach is the easy part. Determining to what degree teachers have actually applied these standards to their daily lessons is another question that needs answering. That probably won’t occur simply because success of this reform has been (and continues to be) judged by test scores. These numbers reveal “what” teachers teach, not how they taught.

While some early judgments on the failure of this reform have been made (see https://www.brookings.edu/articles/why-common-core-failed/ and here), surely, far more direct observations of classroom lessons, teacher surveys, and student responses would be necessary to find out the influence that Common Core Standards have had on daily teaching practices. The RAND survey for teaching of English and Language Arts and math, for example, done five years after adoption of Common Core Standards saw little change in teachers’ practices (see here).

The fact is that with all of the hullabaloo over Common Core standards a decade ago, no one can say with a high degree of confidence whether implementation of these standards has, indeed, either changed or improved how U.S. teachers teach in 2025.